Illumination Estimation Challenge: experience of past two years
Institute for Information Transmission Problems, RAS（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所）；National Research University The Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；Gideon Brothers（吉迪恩兄弟公司）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Image Processing Systems Institute of RAS（俄罗斯科学院图像处理系统研究所）；Huawei MultiMedia Team（华为多媒体团队）；University of Milano – Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）
Egor Ershov, Alex Savchik, Ilya Semenkov, Nikola Banić, Karlo Koscević, Marko Subašić, Alexander Belokopytov, Zhihao Li, Arseniy Terekhin, Daria Senshina, Artem… 展开作者
Egor Ershov, Alex Savchik, Ilya Semenkov, Nikola Banić, Karlo Koscević, Marko Subašić, Alexander Belokopytov, Zhihao Li, Arseniy Terekhin, Daria Senshina, Artem Nikonorov, Yanlin Qian, Marco Buzzelli, Riccardo Riva, Simone Bianco, Raimondo Schettini, Sven Lončarić, Dmitry Nikolaev
Illumination estimation is the essential step of computational color constancy, one of the core parts of various image processing pipelines of modern digital cameras. Having an accurate and reliable illumination estimation is important for reducing the illumination influence on the image colors. To motivate the generation of new ideas and the development of new algorithms in this field, the 2nd Illumination estimation challenge~(IEC\#2) was conducted. The main advantage of testing a method on a challenge over testing in on some of the known datasets is the fact that the ground-truth illuminations for the challenge test images are unknown up until the results have been submitted, which prevents any potential hyperparameter tuning that may be biased.
The challenge had several tracks: general, indoor, and two-illuminant with each of them focusing on different parameters of the scenes. Other main features of it are a new large dataset of images (about 5000) taken with the same camera sensor model, a manual markup accompanying each image, diverse content with scenes taken in numerous countries under a huge variety of illuminations extracted by using the SpyderCube calibration object, and a contest-like markup for the images from the Cube+ dataset that was used in IEC\#1.
This paper focuses on the description of the past two challenges, algorithms which won in each track, and the conclusions that were drawn based on the results obtained during the 1st and 2nd challenge that can be useful for similar future developments.
The pipelines of digital cameras contain a part for computational color constancy, which aims to remove the influence of the illumination on the scene colors. One of the best known and most widely used benchmark datasets for this problem is the Color Checker dataset. However, due to the improper handling of the black level in its images, this dataset has been widely misused and while some recent publications tried to alleviate the problem, they nevertheless erred and created additional wrong data. This paper gives a history of the Color Checker dataset usage, it describes the origins and reaso…
Southeast University（东南大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Existing face hallucination methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved impressive performance on low-resolution (LR) faces in a normal illumination condition. However, their performance degrades dramatically when LR faces are captured in low or non-uniform illumination conditions. This paper proposes a Copy and Paste Generative Adversarial Network (CPGAN) to recover authentic high-resolution (HR) face images while compensating for low and non-uniform illumination. To this end, we develop two key components in our CPGAN: internal and external Copy and Paste nets (CPnets)…
Ningbo University（宁波大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Blind image quality assessment (BIQA), which aims to accurately predict the image quality without any pristine reference information, has been extensively concerned in the past decades. Especially, with the help of deep neural networks, great progress has been achieved. However, it remains less investigated on BIQA for night-time images (NTIs) which usually suffers from complicated authentic distortions such as reduced visibility, low contrast, additive noises, and color distortions. These diverse authentic degradations particularly challenges the design of effective deep neural network for bl…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Computational color constancy refers to the estimation of the scene illumination and makes the perceived color relatively stable under varying illumination. In the past few years, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have delivered superior performance in illuminant estimation. Several representative methods formulate it as a multi-label prediction problem by learning the local appearance of image patches using CNNs. However, these approaches inevitably make incorrect estimations for the ambiguous patches affected by their neighborhood contexts. Inaccurate local estimates are likely to br…
Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute（北京电子科技学院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
To meet the women appearance needs, we present a novel virtual experience approach of facial makeup transfer, developed into windows platform application software. The makeup effects could present on the user's input image in real time, with an only single reference image. The input image and reference image are divided into three layers by facial feature points landmarked: facial structure layer, facial color layer, and facial detail layer. Except for the above layers are processed by different algorithms to generate output image, we also add illumination transfer, so that the illumination ef…
Institute For Research In Fundamental Sciences(IPM)（基础科学研究所）
Classical deep neural networks are limited in their ability to learn from emerging streams of training data. When trained sequentially on new or evolving tasks, their performance degrades sharply, making them inappropriate in real-world use cases. Existing methods tackle it by either storing old data samples or only updating a parameter set of DNNs, which, however, demands a large memory budget or spoils the flexibility of models to learn the incremented class distribution. In this paper, we shed light on an on-call transfer set to provide past experiences whenever a new class arises in the da…
MemoGen: Can Past Experience Improve Future Text-to-Image Generation?
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科学与技术大学（广州））；Scholarly, Guangzhou Ziyan Technology Co., Ltd.（学者，广州智源科技有限公司）；LimX Dynamics Technology Co., Ltd.（LimX动力科技有限公司）；Shandong University（山东大学）；Data61/CSIRO Griffith University（Data61/CSIRO格里菲斯大学）；Jiangsu Industrial Technology Research Institute (JITRI)（江苏工业技术研究院（JITRI））
Artificial learning systems aspire to mimic human intelligence by continually learning from a stream of tasks without forgetting past knowledge. One way to enable such learning is to store past experiences in the form of input examples in episodic memory and replay them when learning new tasks. However, performance of such method suffers as the size of the memory becomes smaller. In this paper, we propose a new approach for experience replay, where we select the past experiences by looking at the saliency maps which provide visual explanations for the model's decision. Guided by these saliency…
Traditional knowledge distillation transfers "dark knowledge" of a pre-trained teacher network to a student network, and ignores the knowledge in the training process of the teacher, which we call teacher's experience. However, in realistic educational scenarios, learning experience is often more important than learning results. In this work, we propose a novel knowledge distillation method by integrating the teacher's experience for knowledge transfer, named experience ensemble knowledge distillation (EEKD). We save a moderate number of intermediate models from the training process of the tea…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Niantic；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
We are interested in learning models of intuitive physics similar to the ones that animals use for navigation, manipulation and planning. In addition to learning general physical principles, however, we are also interested in learning ``on the fly'', from a few experiences, physical properties specific to new environments. We do all this in an unsupervised manner, using a meta-learning formulation where the goal is to predict videos containing demonstrations of physical phenomena, such as objects moving and colliding with a complex background. We introduce the idea of summarizing past experien…
Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所）
The paper describes our experience collecting a new dataset for the light source estimation problem in a single image. The analysis of existing color targets is presented along with various technical and scientific aspects essential for data collection. The paper also contains an announcement of an upcoming 2-nd International Illumination Estimation Challenge (IEC 2020).
Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University（杜克大学普拉特工程学院）
Recent machine learning techniques have dramatically changed how we process digital images. However, the way in which we capture images is still largely driven by human intuition and experience. This restriction is in part due to the many available degrees of freedom that alter the image acquisition process (lens focus, exposure, filtering, etc). Here we focus on one such degree of freedom - illumination within a microscope - which can drastically alter information captured by the image sensor. We present a reinforcement learning system that adaptively explores optimal patterns to illuminate s…
Specular reflection exists widely in photography and causes the recorded color deviating from its true value, so fast and high quality highlight removal from a single nature image is of great importance. In spite of the progress in the past decades in highlight removal, achieving wide applicability to the large diversity of nature scenes is quite challenging. To handle this problem, we propose an analytic solution to highlight removal based on an L2 chromaticity definition and corresponding dichromatic model. Specifically, this paper derives a normalized dichromatic model for the pixels with i…
In many previous works, a single-pixel imaging (SPI) system is constructed as an optical image encryption system. Unauthorized users are not able to reconstruct the plaintext image from the ciphertext intensity sequence without knowing the illumination pattern key. However, little cryptanalysis about encrypted SPI has been investigated in the past. In this work, we propose a known-plaintext attack scheme and a ciphertext-only attack scheme to an encrypted SPI system for the first time. The known-plaintext attack is implemented by interchanging the roles of illumination patterns and object imag…
